Tokugawa-relationship-degrees

Tokugawa Confucian approaches to the central object of ritual attention in Confucian ancestral rites, the spirit tablet (shinshu E, Chinese shenzhu), show other repercussions of a lack of attunement to degrees of relationship. According to Jiali, the spirit tablet was to be inscribed with the name of the deceased at the time of interment of the coffin. Installed in the family offering hall (shidō, Chinese citang), it served as the repository for the soul of the deceased and for the next several generations was the object of individual sacrifices by the deceased’s descendants. With each change in generation the tablet was reinscribed (to indicate, e.g., that what had been the tablet of a father was now that of a grandfather) and moved to a new place in the ancestral hall appropriate to its changed relationship with the sacrificer. Eventually, after “kinship was exhausted,” the tablet was removed from the offering hall to the grave site.

These practices reflected the Chinese concept of the soul as gradually dispersing as its link to the current generation of family members became more distant. They also indicated the ways in which ritual rested upon and actualized norms of generational hierarchy. Through the reinscription and relocation of the tablets of his ancestors, the sacrificer, one might argue, acquired a heightened awareness of his precise position relative to his ancestors and kin. He likewise experienced in a tangible form the underlying pattern of Heaven and Earth of which the graded relationships within the family were a fundamental part. We see here a prime example of premises regarding the efficacy of li as a means of aligning the individual with the Way. It is precisely these aspects that fade from view in Tokugawa discussions of spirit tablets.

Wakabayashi Kyōsai, for example, while nominally adhering to Jiali’s premise of the gradual “exhaustion of kinship,” tended, in fact, to regard the spirit invested in the tablet as imperishable. This is evident in his reference to the tablet as shintai, the term used in the native Japanese tradition to indicate an object embodying a deity, and in his identification of the spirit as “the divinity (shinmei ) that exists eternally.” Underlining this view of the shinshu as shintai, the sacred locus of an eternal spirit, Kyōsai exhibited discomfort about the Chinese custom of reinscribing the tablet each generation. To write the name of the sacrificer “on the shintai,” as was stipulated by Jiali, “is distasteful,” he demurred, and by inscribing only the name and title of the deceased on the tablet and not his generational relationship to the current head of the house, one could avoid the “troublesome” practice of reinscribing the tablet each generation. 14 Sorai and Kyōsai proposed other modifications as well of elements of the ritual prescribed by Jiali that they regarded as potential obstacles to the adoption of Confucian funerary rites in Japan. One was the extravagant expression of grief. Repeated “wailing to the full extent of one’s grief” figured centrally in Jiali’s description of the sequence of actions involved in preparing the corpse for burial and the burial itself. Kyōsai suggested that this, too, was an area where it would be better to follow national custom. “While the feeling of grief is no different in China and Japan, each country has its own appropriate customary manner of expressing it.“15 Sorai agreed that it would be difficult in Japan to implement wailing and calling for the soul of the deceased to return to the body, “particularly in urban quarters.”¹

Sorai and Kyōsai also shared the view that it would not be practical for their countrymen, who by and large did not live in extended families and lacked the retinue of servants taken for granted by Jiali, to adhere to the stipulation that as a sign of their inconsolable grief the sons and daughters of the deceased should “refrain from eating for three days.” As Kyōsai put it, while what was “fundamental to li is the same past and present, near and far,” when it came to enacting that fundamental essence, it was necessary “to take time and circumstance into consideration and make adjustments in accordance with social station and the degree of wealth or poverty.”²

Kyōsai and Sorai recommended adjustments of this sort in Confucian funerary ritual with the aim of facilitating its acceptance by their countrymen. Despite their efforts, practice of such rites remained confined to a small circle of the informed and committed; it never became part of either the actuality or image of elite culture, let alone general custom. We can suggest several reasons why this was so. One was that by the latter part of the seventeenth century, people were expected to be registered as parishioners (danka) of a recognized Buddhist temple as evidence that they did not harbor subversive religious inclinations (meaning primarily, but not exclusively, Christianity). A household’s affiliation with a temple was, in turn, largely consolidated by having that temple perform funerary and memorial services for deceased family members. In such circumstances, utilization of alternative funerary ritual came to be regarded with suspicion.

… Tokugawa Confucians likewise, as James McMullen has shown in an illuminating discussion, came down largely on the side of adherence to Confucian principle.

There were those, however, who expressed doubts. One was Kumazawa Banzan, who as with the issue of endogamy, called for a gradualist, low-key approach. Another was Miwa Shissai. Among the samurai class, Shissai pointed out, where a house was in fact a sociopolitical unit comprising the lord and his vassals, the welfare of the latter depended upon the continuation of the house in name, not biological substance. To allow a house to be terminated on purist grounds because there was no appropriate agnatic heir would unjustly set adrift the vassals who had served it faithfully since the time of their ancestors. To justify the priority he gave continuation of the house as a corporate entity over maintenance of the blood link between ancestor and descendant, Shissai offered a twist on the Chinese Confucian notion of the “exhaustion of kinship” figuring in mourning regulations. “Blood ties” (kechimyaku ), he noted, “no matter how important… come to an end anyway in five generations.“9 A similar reordering of Chinese Confucian views of the relationship between house and kinship was invoked to support the deliberate choice of an unrelated heir. Given the importance of preservation of “the house inherited from one’s ancestors,” Shissai argued, it would be justifiable to pass over a child who was not up to that task and select instead a worthy outsider as heir to the house. 10

Miwa Shissai may represent an extreme position among Tokugawa Confucians on the issue of nonagnatic adoption. Yet when it …